Archive for the ‘Observations’ Category

I have a question. How do YOU deal with the parking garage guys who take the tickets on your way out?

Because I? Do not have any workable solutions.

Solution one: ignore. Meaning, I barely glance at them as they smile and say, “Thank you, have a nice day” or “How are you doing today?” and I roll my window up as quickly as it will climb the second the ticket is out of my hand.

But this seems unnecessarily rude. It’s not THEIR fault they have this job – I mean, SOMEONE has to have this job and it can’t be a trained MONKEY!

Can it?

I feel like I would prefer to give my ticket to a trained monkey.

Or to a woman!

I’ve never felt odd or awkward giving my ticket to a women. Women are easy – they just take my ticket without saying anything at all – the Zero Pressure Technique – or, they smile and are really friendly, and I’m friendly back, because after all, what’s up, girlfriend? Cool blue nails, even though they’re fake – somehow they look fine on you!

Or something like that.

Whereas the men… I don’t know. I get mild stalker-y vibes from them.

Solution two: be friendly back to them. But this makes me feel fake and icky, because, I mean, who are these guys? What exactly do they want from me!? I don’t want to make eye contact, smile, and ask how they are doing too. I just want to get the hell out of there so I can pick up my kids from school on time.

Am I being paranoid?

I just don’t know what they expect from me, with their friendly banter and glance at me, as if the last thing I should want to do would be to roll up my window fast, turn my radio back on, and pedal it-to the metal-it out of there.

But that is how I feel.

Why can’t they just take the ticket, nod, and not seek out eye contact and a smile?

When my father was in town, we went to a few different restaurants and a play together, and I can’t recall which parking venue it happened in, but there was one place where, as we left the ticket guy in our wake, my dad remarked, “Well he wasn’t very nice.”

Huh? You want the guy to be nice?

New rule: Parking attendant men? You guys are encouraged and even required to make small talk and eye contact with the men who drive out of your lots. But when the women drive out? Take their ticket in silence and look out for who’s driving up to your window next.

Parking attendant women? Keep on keepin on, g-friends. I want to see stars and stripes on those babies next time your fingers take the card from mine!

Never said life was fair.

c/xo,

Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)

I wanted to also draw a lady with long stars-and-stripes fingernails. But I can really only crank out one masterpiece at a time, people. So you'll just have to imagine her. Because she's perfect.

I thought about titling the blog “If the Shoe Fits” and then adding an asterisk, where, down below, the thoughtful reader would find some kind of witty footnote remark, like ‘then I obviously didn’t buy it in Europe” or “then it’s probably some ugly boat I’m trying to pass off as footwear.”

Bottom line here? My feet are… not what you would call small and dainty.

Unless you are Andre the Giant! He might think my feet were small and dainty.

But to most others – including my husband, whose feet are basically the same length as mine, just wider – my feet are more of the “large and in charge” variety.

For a man, that’s the kind of cool status ‘tell’ – like big hands – that makes the babes excited and other guys jealous and makes the guy who HAS the big feet or big hands super easy-going and confident, because, hey, let’s face it, whatever other shit life and chaos this guy has going on, at least he’s got a big penis.

Not so much, for the ladies.

For the ladies, it’s like “big feet, big – uh – okay, that’s gross.”

Or, put more delicately, “big feet, big – um – socks?”

Only that would be a lie, because I can tell you that nobody cool (like Puma or Polo) makes decent women’s socks that fit big women’s feet. Trust me. I fall for it EVERY time.

I see a set of women’s socks hanging there in the store, like a dazzled fish spotting a shiny lure in a murky sea.

I read the label: it says it fits sizes 6.5-11!!! It will fit me!! I’m only a size 10!!!! (10.5 if I was pregnant within a year or so of sock-shopping, but let’s not even go there.) Yay!!! Cool socks!

Cool socks, indeed. Cool socks that, after one or two washings, I have no choice but to slip quietly into my 8 year old son’s drawer so at least SOMEONE in the house can enjoy them comfortably, or – if they have pink or girly stuff on them – donate to charity.

I think I could probably have my own Goodwill sock line. BatSheva. Socks for GrownupGirls with giant feet. Has a certain ring to it, no?

No.

No, it doesn’t.

Sigh…

c/xo,

Sheva (BatSheva “Goodwill Sock Hunting” Vaknin)

A (nearly) true-to-life portrait of me, on the very first day I was born.

You know that thing? That thing, where, it’s Thursday night, the last real weeknight of the kids’ (and your) “winter break” and you kind of pushed it so after your husband made this amazing dinner, you know it’s your turn to do the dishes and you’re totally down with that but once you put the kids to bed you realize you’re the last person awake in the house (including your husband) and even though it’s only 8:45 it feels kind of like midnight and the last thing you feel like doing is the dishes and you consider leaving them all for the once-a-week housekeeper who will come tomorrow but you know that’s a total cop-out move and so you know sooner or later you’ll have to bite the bullet and just do the m-f-ing dishes and you’re just about to get going when you decide instead to sit for a minute at your computer?

No?

Oh.

Sometimes I think I’ve got a whole lot of nothing going on in my head. I’ll lie down at night – earlier than usual these days, thanks to the exhaustion of pregnancy + busy days and especially thanks to my nudge-y husband (when did he get so nudge-y!?) who now goes to sleep at, like, 8pm, most nights because he’s waking up at something like, 2am to start his day… (yes I may be exaggerating just a tad)… but anyway -

Where was I?

Oh yeah. The stupid thoughts in my head.

Wednesday night, I lay wide awake in bed, thinking about dumb, stupid things (i.e. – wondering what Facebook ‘friends’ who I never ever ever see and never ever ever were friends with in real life but who sort of maybe knew who I was at one point so they accepted my friend request, must think of me – in a judge-y way, of course – about how they probably think my name BatSheva is so weird and different, and how my life is so weird and different– and then I think how even stupider it is that I am wasting even 10 seconds caring about any of this, and obviously none of these Facebook ‘friends’ probably waste even 10 seconds thinking about me)…

And then I fall asleep, only to wake up at 4:23am to 3 year old Esther, who is crying from a nightmare. And as I take her to our bed I realize I was having a massive nightmare myself, about live sharks swimming in the water beneath my feet as I walked from room to room of a hotel I was staying at for some event where I didn’t know anybody.

The dream didn’t seem scary as much as it seemed unnecessarily stressful. Sort of like Facebook.

Lately, my thoughts have been overrun with fluff and nonsense. A product of my 2 weeks vacation from blogging?

I know, I know.

Quit thinking, start scrubbing. Dishes await.

c/xo,

Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)

I know there is a lot going on here. Seriously, I'm down with copyright protection & all, but let's face it: we'd ALL be better off if the internet would just let me "BORROW" some cool images for my blogs! I promise I'll give them back!

You know that delicious, baked-bread smell of a small baby’s head? Well, my littlest one (not SO little anymore – 3 1/2 going on 19) still smells delicious and adorable.

And lately, she also smells like… Italy.

Or, to be precise, Italian food.

It all started with my quest to help quell her incessant, never-ending itchy scratchy skin. For the first couple of years, it was mostly her lower back that bothered her – I’d find her little back & tushie striped with fingernail marks and scratches where she had scratched herself raw from sheer itchiness. (Mind you, no actual RASH or bumps existed there. Even the skin didn’t look or feel particularly dry to the touch. But to her? Drove her CRAZY.)

Los Angeles is a dry place. I’ve been told it’s up there among the worst cities for skin. (Yes, that is the kind of thing we Los Angelinos talk about at parties. Sometimes beauty really is only skin-deep.) But I’m not planning to move my family out of here just because it’s not the best for our complexions, nor can I afford any of those fancy high-tech, no-mold, room-moisturizing and water-moisturizing systems.

So we get itchy. And Esther, with her daddy’s beautiful Moroccan-Isaeli skin, gets, as we say in the Vaknin household, “super itchy scratchy.”

For her first couple years, I mostly used Aquaphor, which has a sort of Vaseline-like consistency. It helped a bit, if I slathered it on her body day and night, but it didn’t seem to penetrate particularly deeply. This past year, the itching has spread to her front calves where she has torn them raw from scratching, and also to the base of her little neck, where she got a bit of sun poisoning this summer and now it keeps flaring up again and again.

I took her to the doctor to look at the sun poisoning flare-up and ask about the itching, and she shrugged & casually diagnosed that it ‘probably is eczema’ and wrote a prescription for some extra-strength cortisone cream that didn’t help whatsoever. Our insurance doesn’t cover fancy dermatologists, and it didn’t seem important enough to shell out that kind of dough, out of pocket, for another diagnosis.

So, back to the home remedies. Baby powder seemed to help the sun poison rash for a bit, until it didn’t. Oatmeal baths didn’t help at all, nor did baby oil baths. The expensive oatmeal creams, ‘natural eczema creams’, and other creams? Tried those too. Nothing worked.

Then, a new friend who owns a skin care empire made a suggestion. No, it wasn’t to buy $300 bottles of his company’s version of La Mer or whatever. It was simple: break open vitamin E capsules and put the vitamin E goo onto the open scratches. And use olive oil for daily maintenance.

So by now we all know I’m pregnant. Which means… ladies, altogether now:

SUCKY MATERNITY CLOTHES!

Why do maternity clothes suck? Let me count the ways. (and btw, I apologize for the lack of SPACE between each listed item, below. HOW DO YOU F$*#(&%#$-ING USE WORDPRESS TO CREATE A PROPER LIST WITH NORMAL SPACING???!!!!?? ARGHHH!!)

Ahem.

1. Cap sleeves. Didn’t like them when I was four, don’t like them now. What do the designers think happens to a woman when she gets pregnant – that her fashion sense and style automatically reverts to Laura Ingalls circa-1820?

2. The belt below the bra. I mean, come ON! Really? Really?? Just because my belly is growing larger, doesn’t mean you now need to amplify it’s existence by strapping a ribbon or a belt below my boobs to help the belly-part of the shirt poof out even that much more. Don’t you have ANY imagination? [PS - and what is up with women wearing those types of shirts when they are NOT pregnant??? Ladies, don't you realize that shirt is making you LOOK 5 months preggers? Don't get lazy, find another style to suit your beautiful if not stick-skinny body! Don't give in to the bra-belt hype!]

3. Shitty construction. And by that I mean: my 6 year old could have slapped a few pieces of material & sewn them together in a more lasting and secure way than these people do! Why does the fact that you only wear these clothes for a few months mean the seams need to start coming apart and the whole thing starts to lose shape after 3 weeks?

4. If it doesn’t have shitty construction… it cost about a million dollars. Seriously. A million. This prowling, selfish industry is out to bankrupt us, my pregnant sisters! Because if you want to wear something half-way decent WITHOUT cap sleeves and WITHOUT a belt below your bra and WITHOUT the thing falling apart in 2 days… you have to empty your bank account to afford it. What is up with that???

After 3 kids & now into my 4th pregnancy, I realize the only way to go is to buy clothes in bigger sizes that are cute and fashionable and cut in a way that allows for tons of room in the belly arena. Too bad that is also expensive, time-consuming, and altogether nearly-impossible for a shopping-impaired person like myself.

Don’t get me wrong – I love to shop – but I simply don’t have the 3-4 hours it takes PER STORE to look, try on, and find those affordable gems that will look great, fit perfectly, and last forever.

Many of you know me. I’m hard-working, caring, a great writer (& obviously not afraid to toot my own horn cause I’m also a Leo!)… Bottom line, I have many wonderful qualities and I’m not ashamed of them.

But I am a little ashamed… of my complete and utter lack of talent or desire when it comes to anything in the realm of home decorating.

In my house, don’t be shocked to walk by ancient photos framed in even more ancient frames – mis-matched, of course. Bookshelves in random areas like the hallway, stuffed with appliances, tools and “stuff” that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

The stains on our couches? Look, I tried to clean them! They don’t come out!

The lack of proper utensils or matching plates for more than 4 people? Who knows what happened to those 20 other matching sets over the years!

The bare lightbulbs here and there? The nails without pictures, and the pictures without nails, leaning haplessly against the walls on the floor?

What do you want from me?? We can’t all be Martha Stewart!

Though apparently, our daughters can.

My youngest daughter already shows great promise in the realm of the visual arts. I’m told by her teachers that her careful “coloring inside the lines” foretells great things for her future – decorating and other.

But meanwhile, the actualized talent of my 6 ½ year old is quite exciting. I mean, that girl can organize and decorate a room! She doesn’t just clean up and then stuff all the crayons, hairbands and tiny toys into one box and shut the lid (like I MAY have POSSIBLY done once or twice) – she actually takes the time, effort and care to sort them and arrange them in a visually pleasing way.

She loves to draw, paint, and do crafts, and yes – to decorate our home. Often I’ll find a new picture hanging from the hook in my bedroom where the curtain ties hang.

“Surprise!” The picture shouts at me, with its rainbows, hearts and beautifully red-lipped girls, “at least someone in your house thinks about making it look pretty once in a while!

Dear readers, my daughter has set the Martha Stewart bar in our house, and she has set it high.

Alright, little lady: Game On! I learned how to draw a ‘legible’ picture by the age of 40 – this old dog’s got some home decorating tricks up her admittedly partially-stained and in-need-of-patching sleeves!

Until we meet again…

c/xo,

Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)

"What you need a little menorah? Sure, I'll whip a little something up for you. One sec - TA-DA!"

Dear readers – I know I dropped a bomb on you yesterday, but I’ve no time at present to talk about all the pros (bigger boobs) and cons (doctors wanting to brainwash me with scary genetically problematic statistics) of having another baby at age blorty.

Because at present, we must talk about the world-wide phenomenon that is:

Fifty Shades.

Of Ridiculousness.

Because, readers, I mean, COME ON.

Yes, I am a human female, I did get sucked into the books’ crack-like romantic premise and promise. It’s heroin-esque depiction of a more perfect world, where a rich-but-totally-messed-up-boy-meets-poor-but fiesty-virgin-girl-who-rocks-his-world-and-turns-it-upside-down-just-as-he-does-to-her-world — via a story in which there just happens to be an overabundance of S&M pornographic sex scenes (oh great, here come the digital blog looking for the word ‘sex’ spammers; comments section- look out!!), but who really cares about those uncomfortable and downright ridiculous porno/spanking/handcuff/”silver ball”/etc. scenes when meanwhile there is a bad boy who is just secretly aching to be tamed, trained, married and made into an honest man & perfect husband & father?

No one. That’s who cares.

I, like most of my girlfriends who read the books, did not sleep for more than a few hours here and there as I sucked down the cotton candy that was the substance of these stories. As much as I was utterly annoyed with the writing and the stupid sex scenes (scenes, I might add, that somehow inspired friends of mine to go crazy with their husbands – okay, ladies, whatever floats your previously uninspired boats!) – I was, I admit, completely unable to put the things down until I was done devouring them.

I mean come on… Fifty!? (the main guy character; his real name, of course, is Christian Grey, what else COULD it be??) Of COURSE he is a self-made billionaire international businessman, aged 28, with his hooded, sexy eyes, tousled auburn hair (come on, what the F-ck does that mean!?) and sexy, ripped jeans.

And of COURSE Ana (short for – duh! – Anastasia) would be a perfectly innocent yet utterly wise beyond her years virgin who of course trips and falls, literally, into Fifty’s arms the very first time they meet? (Again, DUH! doesn’t every girl take mental lessons from our beloved Sandra Bullock as she trips her way through romantic comedy after romantic comedy? Brilliant!)

Okay, the Cirque-du-Soleil porno sex scenes I really could have done without.

But everything else? Perfection.

Perfectly, romantically, deliciously, happy-endingly…

Ridiculousness.

c/xo,

Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)

This picture tells you all you really need to know about the book. Decipher my handwriting at your own risk!

At a lovely restaurant the other night with friends, I was the only one who ordered (and ate) dessert – chocolate lava cake. I don’t really like alcohol, so for me, as I’ve mentioned in past blogs, chocolate is my last remaining substance-intake-related sin.

If you can even call chocolate a substance…

I prefer “baked love.”

Anyhow, as I was eating my baked love-AHEM-!-chocolate cake, my friend outed her husband. She told us that the reason he wasn’t partaking was because the night before, he had over-indulged in the dessert at a friend’s dinner party, and since that dessert was particularly disgusting, he had eaten platefuls upon platefuls of it until he felt physically sick – a condition that lasted until that morning.

Uhhhhh… excuse me, did I hear that right?

It was disgusting… so he ate it nonstop.

?

Apparently, yes. My friend explained to us that her husband was so eager to make people feel good (at least when it comes to their cooking), he always ate way more than he would normally when he was offered something he didn’t like, just so the person would never suspect that he didn’t like it and get offended or feel disappointed.

Iiiinteresting.

Actually, I can relate, because, while I don’t generally go to the lengths of making myself physically sick in order to ensure my host is happy, I do understand the desire to make a host/server/cook feel appreciated.

But THEN… it came out that in this case – the case of my friend’s husband, eating platefuls of the gross dessert – the host never even saw him eat the dessert! So he literally had no reason to keep shoveling it in his mouth.

Except…

I still get it.

Because for me, when I eat something gross, I find I must “top it off” with something delicious. The worst part is that usually, I have eaten most if not all of the gross food/dessert (though maybe not platefuls of it), in the hopes that SOMEHOW it will start tasting yummier the more bites I take.

I mean, come on, it LOOKS delicious!!!

You know what I mean? So finally, when my body revolts and my stomach inflates like a hot air balloon, and a sour liquid starts to erupt in the back of my throat, I realize that I SHOULD actually just stop eating. Period.

But… I find that in the same way I only like a movie with a happy ending, I also only like a MEAL with a happy ending. So, no matter how many calories I already consumed, and no matter how tight my jeans feel across my belly, if I ate something yucky, I feel I MUST go immediately to the closest Urth Caffe and order at least one warm chocolate chip cookie.

Stat!

(…or whatever close substitute I can get to, if I can’t get to Urth. Which is dangerous, because if I eat another dessert that ALSO tastes gross, I’ll feel even worse and yet STILL need to find that final happy ending bite…)

c/xo,

Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)

See if THAT tasted bad, I'd be so disappointed, I would first eat the whole thing just to be SURE... and THEN I'd have to have some ice cream at the end of it just to leave me with a good taste in my mouth. Excuse me, I need to go barf now.

Every Friday, I post an oldie but a goodie blog for your enjoyment. To those of you who just started reading The Grownup Girl recently, enjoy the “new” blog! To those of you who have been with me from the start, but have memories like mine, enjoy the “new” blog!

And to those who were with me from the start and who already read this blog and burned it into your memory, word for word, photogenically, I say:

What are you doing wasting your time dilly-dallying on my website? Get out there and find me a book deal!

I should have bought stock in Excedrin – I was onto Excedrin from around age 10 (years before the rest of the world – including Excedrin itself if you go by when they started running their migraine headache ads – discovered that Excedrin is THE only decent medical solution for a pounding migraine). Later, though, in my 20’s and early 30’s, Advil was my painkiller of choice. I loved those yummy little auburn pills, and they generally kicked the headache away, though occasionally I admit I had to take up to four at a time sometimes to really get the job done.

I’m not sure what caused me to stop taking painkillers for headaches recently. Perhaps I was tired of being jealous of my girlfriend who never takes any drugs for any pain, and decided to let her inspire me instead. Perhaps it was the comprehension of what it means to give birth to three babies without a drop of pain medicine – could a headache really be as painful as the giant head of a human forcing its way out of your vagina? No. It could not. (Sorry for that visual, guys, & sorry girls who aren’t moms yet.) (And – yo, High five, other moms!)

And yet…

My excuse for giving birth without painkillers had more to do with the baby’s health than my own – I liked the idea of keeping my baby drug-free for at least the first few days or weeks of its life. When it comes to my own body, it is not exactly a temple – I do have the occasional drink and over-indulge in desserts here and there, but I do eat pretty healthy, I don’t drink soda, and don’t do any drugs or heavy drinking like I may or may not have done in my teens and twenties. (Thank GOD we didn’t have YouTube and cameras everywhere back then. People may “remember,” but no one can prove I was anything less than a saint!)

But if not a temple, I do treat my body like something I’d like to keep around as long as possible, and in decent shape while I’m at it. So I eat healthfully, I drink tons of water, I exercise, and I don’t smoke or do drugs or drink more than a glass or so of wine a week.

So where does the Advil fit in? It doesn’t. I think years of listening to my homeopathic doctor has worn me down – I now believe him when he tells me Advil is hurting my body more in the long run than it is helping it in the short run. (For anyone who read my last blogyou know I didn’t bother to read up about it, so his word really is all I have to go on…)

One week ago, I found myself in the throes of a pretty obnoxious headache. Pounding head, rigid neck muscles… after a few hours, it grew worse and worse… until I was finally nauseous and ready to vomit. I lay on our couch, useless to my husband and my kids, and I tried to remember how much worse it must have been, giving birth. (Couldn’t remember, BTW – it’s true what they say about forgetting how it feels. Obvi – how else could women get suckered into having more than one child?)

Then – the most amazing thing happened. It went away.

First it was a ‘start and stop’ kind of a thing, where I’d think it was leaving me, only for it to return with a vengeance a few moments later. But finally, it was complete gone. And then I DID remember something about giving birth without drugs: that surreal moment after it’s done, and the baby is out. You feel more lucid and alive than ever before in your life. You survived! You made it! The endorphins kick in and you feel like ten million bucks. (Until the breastfeeding starts, and the lack of sleep overtakes you and makes you feel like a zombie, but we won’t burst that bubble just yet.)

This past weekend I lived through a mild flu/severe cold (who the hell can tell the difference?) without taking anything except for homeopathic remedies. (It actually may be time to buy stock in Oscillococcinum, that stuff is GOLD.) I’m still a little stuffy, but I made it through the worst of the storm and I was drug-free as the clouds lifted and the aches finally cleared. Modern medicine is fantastic. But as grateful as I am for all its bounty, I find myself even more thankful for my ever-stronger willpower that has afforded me a rare taste of that “light at the end of a tunnel” health I now relish.

Every Friday, I post an oldie but a goodie blog for your enjoyment. To those of you who just started reading The Grownup Girl recently, enjoy the “new” blog! To those of you who have been with me from the start, but have memories like mine, enjoy the “new” blog!

And to those who were with me from the start and who already read this blog and burned it into your memory, word for word, photogenically, I say:

What are you doing wasting your time dilly-dallying on my website? Get out there and find me a book deal!

I don’t know if they even have such a thing these days, but back when I was in 5th grade and had no boobs to speak of whatsoever, I proudly owned my first Training Bra. I say “owned” and not “wore” because if memory serves (and it often doesn’t, for more on that read my Memory Loss blog), once I actually tried on the bra, I found it was far less comfortable than my ten years of no bra wearing.

These days, I still have no boobs to speak of, but instead of a training bra I’ve got fantastic Victoria’s Secret bras, the secret of which I’d never tell for fear of the Victoria’s Secret Mafia finding out, but suffice it to say, it may have something to do with silicone and optical illusions.

Note to self: Figure out how many self-referential blog references are really “allowed” in a blog before the blog itself becomes one big advertisement for past blogs. Research ideas: watch The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, poke around online, read this blog once it’s done to see if it comes across too Hey look at me! -y…

Ahem. As I was saying, my boobs are gigantic. Wait, sorry – what I was saying? Sorry, I was just looking at myself in the mirror (I’m wearing a new Victoria’s Secret bra) and I got distracted.

That’s right, I was talking about bras and how I’ve never really needed them. And then I started to write a paragraph about going bra-less but I just had a flashback to how my father commented on one of my recent blogs (my acid trip blog) and suddenly the prospect of writing about my own boobs has 100% lost its appeal.

Wow – imagining my dad reading my blog turns out to be a better censoring tool than the FCC! Thanks a lot, Pops. (Actually, seriously – THANK YOU. I really don’t need to be a stream-of-conscious-writer in a public arena where someday my future run for president may be jeopardized. But just in case I decide to write about something racy in the future, I’ll post a “NO DAD GO HERE” warning, k, Dad?)

Well, let me just wrap it up by saying this: I’m not admitting and I’m not not admitting to having naturally large or small boobs… but I will say if I ever have a chance to buy stock in Victoria’s Secret, I just may do so.